Cooking weeds

The weeds of the field and garden have two big advantages in the kitchen: firstly, they are free to anyone; secondly, they contain any amount of dietary goodness, often not so readily available from the anaemic products of the hothouse and intensive farm. And what is really needed is a set of recipes to turn them into everybody's favourite supper. This Vivien Weise provides in spades. With plenty of clear illustrations of the plants in question - ensuring that every reader will be able to identify the quarry when out gathering - Vivien has created a series of vegetarian dishes (all the recipes are meat-free) with a defiantly modern slant: comfrey hamburgers, daisy ginger soup, dandelion salad with a banana yoghurt sauce, dead nettle aubergine spread, ground elder layered pancakes, and many more. The great charm of this book is that you can go into the vegetable plot with two baskets: one for dinner and one for the compost heap. While gathering your supper, you weed the garden. In the popular weed-cookery courses that Vivien gives at her home in Germany, she demonstrates the culinary value of upwards of a hundred different plants.